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'Wilson': Flesh-and-blood portrait of a president

By Matt Damsker Idealism rarely trumps political ambition, but for Woodrow Wilson, America's 28th president, idealism was the little engine that could. Yes, timing is everything, and the early 20th century and

Idealism rarely trumps political ambition, but for Woodrow Wilson, America's 28th president, idealism was the little engine that could. Yes, timing is everything, and the early 20th century and the World War I era were transitional times, as the U.S. moved to the forefront of global power.

Beforehand, it had been a more provincial laboratory of democracy. And true to its alchemy, Wilson, a humble minister's son out of Virginia, was a disciplined intellectual who rose quietly to the presidency of Princeton University.

Even so, for an academic who had never run for public office as late as October 1910 to become America's Commander-in-Chief by November 1912, and to then launch an epoch of progressive policy that would span the Great War and lay the foundation for the United Nations and the New Deal -- well, where to begin?

A. Scott Berg's new 800-page biography, Wilson (**** stars out of four), spares no detail. It takes a certain quixotic passion to give us Wilson -- whom, if we think of him at all, we think of as stiff and statesmanly – with such thorough fact-sifting that we emerge, stunned, at the end of a seemingly endless historical tunnel, having met and marveled at the American presidency's last great idealist.

For no president, not even Lincoln, burned so purely with a world-historical vision of multilateral peacekeeping while, at home, he fought for the 99% (indeed, 1% of Americans owned half the nation's wealth back then). Wilson's "New Freedom" agenda established much of what many on the right wing now despise, from the modern income tax to stronger anti-trust laws, an eight-hour workday, and corporate liability. Yet Berg is hardly the first historian to cite Wilson's progressive bona fides; the larger point of this epic effort is that Wilson was more flesh-and-blood than political anomaly.

Berg, it must be noted, doesn't grind out copy. Over 40 years, he's given us just four life studies, of legendary editor Maxwell Perkins; Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn; Charles Lindbergh (Pulitzer Prize, 1998); and a best-selling memoir of Katharine Hepburn.

Wilson is his most ambitious if least sexy undertaking, scripturally dense, a codex that richly explains Wilson's policy revolution while establishing the man's full humanity, his flaws and failings.

Despite the loftiness of his great aims, he trod, infamously, on free speech with the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917-18, while his administration set back civil rights for decades by instituting racial segregation in D.C. and the federal government. Wilson was very much a white man in a white man's world, yet Berg mines the record in all its complexity and tragedy (and is the first biographer with access to two caches of letters, from Wilson's daughter and private physician). This Wilson is no bespectacled cipher who had greatness thrust upon him by a relentless modernity.

Instead, we meet a deeply Christian man who orates potently, with plenty of political savvy and a tightly wound exterior that won't betray the intense emotion of his personal life: Berg has read the thousands of love letters Wilson penned to his first wife, Ellen. In deep grief when she died, he nearly resigned the presidency. But the war summoned and ultimately broke him.

His failed dedication to forming the League of Nations, and his prescient sense that the Treaty of Versailles, in so shaming and punishing Germany, would only lead to another world war, marked his decline. When he suffered a stroke and severe impairment in 1919, the White House – led by his second wife, Edith – covered it up for more than a year, keeping it from even the Cabinet and vice president.

Such opacity, impossible today, seems emblematic of its time and, to a degree, of Wilson himself, a man of privately nurtured ideals uncloaked by public service. It has taken nearly a century for someone with Berg's own, somewhat Wilsonian drive to take the full measure of this singular president, whose soul echoes, fitfully, in the professorial aura and singularity of Barack Obama.

To Berg, our present political landscape is defined not by the scrimmaging of left and right but by "the lengthening shadow of Wilson."